How Has COVID-19 Affected Children and Adolescents?

Since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a worldwide pandemic in 2020, the world’s youth have experienced lockdowns and upheavals in their school, work, and social activities. IPR experts discussed what research indicates about the effects of COVID-era events and policies on February 6, tracing how U.S. youth have fared and what we might expect in the long term.

5-Year-Olds and Under: Responsive Policy Kept Childcare Open

IPR developmental psychologist Terri Sabol noted that the federal government’s policies around childcare were “actually pretty good” as the CARES Act, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, and the American Rescue Plan pumped funds into childcare programs.

Sabol’s research with several Northwestern students shows that in Illinois, these funds were equally distributed across neighborhoods, for the most part. She said that recent spending bills have allocated little toward childcare policies.

There are still major challenges in the early childhood system, Sabol said, pointing to 19 billion hours in missed learning opportunities and childcare workers’ persistently low pay of around $12 per hour on average, and many childcare workers leaving the field.

Along with these challenges, enrollment in early childhood education and in public kindergarten programs has declined nationally. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) lost more than 2,700 kindergartners from 2019 to 2022.

While preschool enrollment did drop during the pandemic, it is beginning to rebound. The jump provides an opportunity to examine if universal pre-K—which CPS rolled out in 2019 before the pandemic hit—brings kids back to early childhood education programs. To find out, she and IPR economist Diane Schanzenbach are collaborating to analyze enrollment data from Chicago’s free, full-day, universal pre-K program.

6- to 18-Year-Olds: Lopsided Learning Losses

IPR economist Jonathan Guryan cited research by Stanford’s Sean Reardon and Harvard’s Thomas Kane calculating that based on test scores, students in third through eighth grades lost the equivalent of half a year of learning in math and a quarter of a year of learning in reading.

“Those lost-learning opportunities were not evenly distributed,” Guryan said. “School districts with more Black and Hispanic kids had larger losses, and districts with higher poverty rates also had larger losses.” in 2012 when rates of depression among 12to 17-year-olds began to increase.

He highlighted another pandemic pattern: Higher rates of remote instruction were linked to larger learning losses, and this was especially true of higher poverty schools, where students spent more time learning remotely.

“We saw this not just around the country, but at home here in Chicago,” Guryan explained, pointing to dramatic declines in students’ National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores from 2019 to 2022.

In May 2020 when CPS was in remote learning, roughly 80–85% of fifth-to-twelfthgrade CPS students logged in to Google Meet or Google Classroom, the tools CPS used for online learning. And 25–30% did not connect at all—and the percentage was even lower for the very youngest students: Only about a third of kindergartners and about half of first and second graders logged in.

Multiple studies comparing levels of depression before and during the pandemic show a slight increase in already high depression rates, but not dramatic ones. For anxiety, however, results are mixed.

“Especially during the early pandemic, there was some relief of social anxiety among students when they didn’t have to go to school, and they were under lockdown,” Adam said. “The change in condition might [have been] bad for learning, but perhaps not as adverse for emotional outcomes.”

For young adults, however, the data paint a different picture: 33% of those between 18 and 29 years old reported clinically significant levels of depression, and 40% reported clinically significant levels of anxiety according to large-scale data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau between April 2020 and August 2022.

Adam called the levels for young adults “concerningly high,” saying they can be partially explained by the economic conditions of younger adults.

Emma Adam is the Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Human Development and Social Policy.

12- to 29-Year-Olds:

Increased Depression and Anxiety

IPR developmental psychobiologist Emma Adam emphasized that “adolescents were not doing well before the pandemic,” starting

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